Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

GT12 mourns the loss a monumental figure in ours and in our country’s intellectual life. Molly Ivins was the first person to really explain to me what the hell all these seemingly insane fundamentalists are all.

Only once in my life have I ever paid to get a recorded copy of something I heard on the radio. It was an Ivins’ speech and it was profoundly funny and deeply compassionate. I am sure that the tape is somewhere deep in the bowels of GT12’s archive but I haven’t been able to find it.

In her speech she defends the motivation and hearts of evangelicals even as she (too lightly) cautioned against their undemocratic bent.

I paraphrase (from memory)

“I have nothing against being ‘born again’; I’ve been saved two or three times. It never ‘took’ but I can’t say that it did me any harm.


What I do know is that they are good people, but scared. Scared of the way that the life and the world they understand seems to be vanishing. “

With that observation I finally understood soooo much. I’d never experienced that fear and never associated any faith that I’ve ever had with assuagement of it. I still can’t emotionally understand why anyone would orient their life around alleviation of fear but I see that people do and that few of them see any alternative to that. These of course are our ‘authoritarian’ followers. Human, loving of family, god-fearing.

This from the NY Times:

In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our sharedhumanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

... She quit The [New York] Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”

But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were
appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper.

In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)

But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).

In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, she urged readers to “raise hell”
against the war.

Cheers Molly and adios. Let's raise some hell in her honor.